GAINESVILLE - Florida Coach Urban Meyer didn't have to defend himself against Randy Shannon's distaste for Saturday's last-minute field goal against Miami.

Tim "The Bodyguard" Tebow had his back.

The Gators' Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback said he was offended by the Hurricanes coach questioning Meyer, who had Jonathan Phillips kick a 29-yard field goal with 25 seconds left to punctuate Saturday night's 26-3 win in The Swamp.

"I'll have Coach Meyer's back on anything. To say something like that about Coach Meyer isn't true at all," Tebow said after Monday's practice. "If you want to talk about him, you should definitely talk about a lot of other coaches before Coach Meyer. You can talk about running the score up, I don't care. They are paid to stop us; [offensive coordinator Dan] Mullen is paid to score. They don't do that, oh well. But you don't have to talk about Coach Meyer as a person and getting into recruits and all that stuff. That's not necessary."

Without calling out Meyer by name, Shannon told reporters on Sunday that Florida's decision actually helped his recruiting.

"Sometimes when you do things and people see what kind of person you really are, you turn a lot of people off," Shannon said. "Take from that what you want. It helped us more than you will ever know."

Meyer dodged the topic on Monday and stuck to football.

"I heard about 25-year this, I heard about field goal this, official this," Meyer said. "Why don't we talk about the players who played a great, hard-nosed football game? I learned a long time ago to just coach your team, take care of yourself. Special teams, offense and defense occupies all of our time. I'm good. We have to move on."

Tebow wasn't ready to move on. Tebow said Shannon's comments bothered him because of Meyer's pedigree, calling him "one of the best coaches in the game."

"What did Coach Meyer do besides recruit good guys, try to keep guys out of jail, doing the right thing, try to work guys into being better people on the field and off the field?" Tebow said. "[He] never says anything bad about anybody, always tries to do the right thing, tries to take young boys and make them into men. We play with character, strength and honor on the field and off. I don't think you usually see many cheap shots or anything wrong that we do. Yeah, we're going to try to score through the whole game. That's our job. We like playing football.

"When we're on the football field and we have the ball, we're not going to not try to score. We're going to try to score. We're going to be nice, we're going to shake their hands. We're going to do all that. . . . I don't think [scoring] has anything to do with the type of person you are. It's not like we were up by that much. We were playing the University of Hawaii -- I mean, Miami -- and we were only up by two touchdowns."

Tebow said he'd rather defend his coach than take a shot at Shannon.

"I'm not going to make any statements about him," Tebow said.

Phillips understands the logic in kicking a last-minute field goal -- for practice. The Gators open the Southeastern Conference season against rival Tennessee on Sept. 20.

"I'm definitely glad I got that rep," Phillips said.

birtikidis

09-11-2008, 09:45 PM

hell i live in gainesville and hadn't even seen that article. i'm glad he said it though. In college football today, you have to impress the voters or else you end up like auburn, not playing in the NC even though you're undefeated while a team like Oklahoma gets in with a loss..